A coloring page of yosenabe, the Japanese hot pot that has no fixed recipe. A clay donabe sits on a portable tabletop burner, filled with prawns, a cut of salmon, cubes of tofu, mushrooms, a carrot sliced into a flower, leafy greens and noodles — a dozen small shapes, each of which can take a colour of its own. Free to download and print as a PDF, no registration needed.
🗣 Conversation Starters — for care activities and family time
Do you remember gathering round a hot pot with family in winter? Who did the cooking?
Which ingredient do you always look for in the pot?
At the end of the meal — rice porridge or udon in what is left of the broth?
Of all the hot pots, which one is the favourite?
What is yosenabe?
Yose means “to gather”, and that is very nearly the whole definition. Seafood, chicken or pork, vegetables, tofu and mushrooms are simmered together in one pot at the table. Unlike sukiyaki, oden or yudofu, which are particular dishes with particular rules, yosenabe has no set list of ingredients — it is the hot pot you build from what is in the kitchen. The broth is usually a kombu and katsuobushi dashi seasoned with soy sauce, mirin and sake, deliberately kept light so that whatever goes into it can still be tasted. Everyone cooks and serves from the same pot as the meal goes along, which is a good part of why it belongs to winter.
What is the shime at the end of a hot pot?
By the end of the meal the broth has taken in everything that was cooked in it, and a Japanese hot pot ends by using that broth rather than pouring it away. The finish is called shime. Rice goes in and is simmered into zosui, a savoury porridge often loosened with beaten egg; udon and Chinese wheat noodles are the other usual choices. Plenty of people will tell you the shime is the part they came for.
What is in the pot on this page, and how would you colour it?
Working outward from the middle: prawns in the shell, which go pink-orange with a deeper line down the back; a cut of salmon, orange with pale bands of fat through it; cubes of tofu; mushroom caps; leafy greens; a slice of carrot cut into a flower; and noodles curling underneath. Two things are worth leaving mostly white — the tofu and the steam — because bare paper does that job better than any pale pencil will. The pot itself is a donabe, unglazed clay outside and glazed within, so the outside takes a flat earthy brown while the rim can go much darker. The burner underneath is plain metal, and a little grey shadow under its feet will sit the whole thing on the table.
